


where we both say the things that we both really feel

by WreakingHavok



Series: ship in a bottle [2]
Category: DreamSMP
Genre: Anyways, Fundy and Ranboo play piano together because I am so lonely, Fundy is probably so fucked up im sorry I am so sorry, Gen, Guess who’s back, I really don’t know what this is, Piano, Ranboo has memory issues, Winds around a little bit but like, back again, its content I guess so out it goes, join me for another round of shit, quangst, tell a friend, tubbo is mentioned like once or twice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-24
Updated: 2021-01-24
Packaged: 2021-03-16 06:09:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,781
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28951716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WreakingHavok/pseuds/WreakingHavok
Summary: “You don’t have to do this, Q,” Fundy reassures him.“No, I know. I - yeah. It’s good for me, or whatever.” Quackity grimaces. “I’ve been hangin’ around Sam too much.”“I’d offer to go first to make it easier, but I don’t remember my dreams,” Ranboo says. “Sorry.”“Oh, were it that easy,” Quackity says. “Thanks. It’s alright. I, uh. It’s a little embarrassing, I guess.”“Try me,” Fundy says.“I dream about Schlatt,” Quackity says.“Oh,” Fundy says.~Fundy’s cold, Quackity is one-thirds dead, neither of them can sleep, and it wouldn’t be a Cabinet Family oneshot without the consequences of Ranboo’s short term memory problems.
Relationships: Alexis | Quackity & Jschlatt, Floris | Fundy & Ranboo, No Romantic Relationship(s)
Series: ship in a bottle [2]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2119335
Comments: 21
Kudos: 162





	where we both say the things that we both really feel

Fundy finds himself lying in bed at four in the morning, cold and tired and absolutely unable to sleep. 

His fur’s getting patchy where it lines his limbs, shedding a worrying amount for the dead of winter. The blankets he’d stolen from the seemingly temperature-immune Ranboo aren’t helping, either. He shivers on a mattress he’s tossed and turned a dent into, freezing for no good reason. 

He knows the heating’s on. He can hear the furnace going. Growling to himself, he turns on his side and hugs his arms to his chest. 

Tubbo’s breakdown burns in his head, replaying over and over like a broken record. The President had never sounded so goddamn tired. Fundy prays the guilt still lurking behind his ribs hadn’t shown on his face - _Tubbo’s small hands shake in Fundy’s, tear tracks on his cheeks, yet the boy still laughs through a mouthful of Quackity’s poorly cooked pancakes and how had they been blind to the bags under his eyes_ \- 

“Fuck it,” Fundy whispers, and gives up on sleeping.

Pulling on one of his jackets, he pads down the hallway as carefully as he can. Tubbo and Ranboo’s rooms lay dormant. Faint muttering filters through Quackity’s tightly shut door. Fundy wouldn’t be surprised if he was still working - they had a festival to plan, after all. Those are a lot to handle.

Fundy wanders downstairs and into the living room, rubbing his hands together and blowing into them. Prime. He’s fucking _cold_. 

The house is dark, nothing but faint moonlight streaming through the windows. Humming to himself, Fundy heads for the light switch, fumbling against the wall until he finds it and when he turns it on -

“Woah,” Ranboo says from the couch, wincing against the sudden brightness even though his sunglasses. 

Fundy starts backwards, having failed to see the other’s tall silhouette prior to just now. “Ranboo?”

There’s a blanket over Ranboo’s shoulders. He’s cross-legged on the couch, just - just sitting there. “Hey, Mr. Foreman.”

“Hey,” Fundy says, trying to act like he isn’t working off a jumpscare. “What - what are you, uh, doing?”

Ranboo curls his abnormally long fingers deeper into the blanket. “I don’t sleep a lot,” is the only answer he gives.

“Sure. Okay.”

“What are _you_ doing?” 

Great question. Fundy’s not about to tell Ranboo the real reason he’s down here. His eyes scan the room, falling on the old upright piano shoved into the corner. 

Saved.

“I thought I’d come down and practice a little,” Fundy shrugs, pointing to the piano. 

“Oh!” Ranboo smiles, apparently finding nothing wrong with the fact that it’s almost tomorrow. But based off Fundy’s previous track record with sleep schedules, he supposes the statement is not out of character at all. 

“Cool. I can leave,” Ranboo adds on as it occurs to him.

Fundy cocks his head, considering, gut lurching at the thought of being alone until dawn. “Nah. You can stay if you like.”

“Really?”

“Yeah, why not?” Fundy moves to sit down on the bench. It puts his back to Ranboo. “Let’s see. What have we?”

He picks up the dusty folder lying abandoned on the top of the piano and rifles through it, picking out two or three pieces. 

“Do you play?” Fundy asks Ranboo, finding the pressing silence a little too much. 

“I, uh, don’t know. I have a poor memory, see,” Ranboo says with exactly the same inflection as his previous seven explanations. 

“Uh huh,” Fundy says. “I know.”

“Oh.” 

“Hey, man, c’mere,” Fundy orders on impulse, scooting over on the bench and patting the open space. “Sit.”

Ranboo looks beside him, like there could be someone else Fundy’s pointing at; upon seeing nothing but dead air around him, the kid shrugs up his shoulders and situates himself beside Fundy.

Fundy points to the music on the stand. “This is a piece called ‘Wet Hands.’”

Ranboo squints at it. “Oh.” The white-gloved fingers on his left hand come up to brush the keyboard.

“Do you know how to read music?” Fundy asks. 

“I don’t know.” Ranboo sounds distant. “I don’t know if I know.”

Fundy clears his throat, feeling like he’s intruding on something he shouldn’t see. “Well, just, start plinking something out. Or, see if you can make something out of it.”

Ranboo squints harder at the lines, settling his blanket more secure on his shoulders. “Uh, how - where -”

“Beginning of the bottom line,” Fundy nods. 

“Bottom line.” Ranboo stares for just long enough that Fundy considers pointing to it, but then he takes a breath and pushes down the first key. Fundy moves his leg out of the way, Ranboo’s foot instinctually settling on the pedal. 

The kid’s hands shake a little, but his rhythm is mostly steady. When it comes time for him to add his right hand, he does so with only a little hesitation. He fumbles a few of the odd jumps and syncopation, but he seems to know where the notes fall on the keyboard. While Fundy can’t see his eyes to figure out what he’s thinking, he notices Ranboo biting at his bottom lip in concentration and tapping his foot almost unnoticeably to the beat.

It’s one of the better renditions Fundy’s heard. Ranboo even tries a little to voice the melody. 

“So you _can_ read,” Fundy says as the last note fades into nothing. 

“I guess I can,” Ranboo says, tight. 

“I wonder who taught you?” Fundy mutters, mostly to himself. 

“Dunno,” Ranboo shrugs, hands jerking away from the keys, pulling at his blanket vacantly. “I didn’t, uh - I don’t even know how old I am, Fundy.”

Fundy sighs. Enough is enough. “Ranboo. Are you okay?”

Ranboo opens his mouth. For a split second, Fundy thinks he’s about to say ‘I don’t know’ for the seven millionth time. 

Thankfully, Ranboo accepts his invitation, and slumps his forearms onto the keys in a discordant jumble. “No.”

Fundy hopes he can keep up from here. He hasn’t exactly come from a long line of therapists - Wilbur was no exception. Fundy swallows and prays he can pretend he’s more like his mother than he is. “What’s wrong?”

Ranboo leans his head on the piano. “I can’t find one of my journals.”

“Oh, shit,” Fundy says. 

The kid is always writing in one of them. Fundy can’t remember a time where he hasn’t had a book on him, whether it be in his claws or under his arm or shoved into the inside pocket of his jacket. 

“I, uh, keep track of things in them,” Ranboo says. “It helps. And I - I must have put one of them down somewhere unusual, and I can’t remember where, and -” a rough exhale - “I don’t remember. I just can’t remember.”

“I’m sorry, dude.” Fundy clicks his tongue. “Have you checked the White House? Want me to help you look?”

Ranboo shakes his head. “I have looked. Everywhere. All my chests, everywhere I can remember going, even the Nether.”

“Damn.” Hesitantly, Fundy brings a hand up to Ranboo’s shoulder, gently brushing his shaggy hair out of the way to rest his fingers there. “Is there - would writing down something, now, help?”

Ranboo peers up at him. “Maybe.”

Fundy picks up the sheet music and a pencil from where it nestles on the keys. “Here. Write down, uh, anything.” 

Ranboo takes it, balancing the paper on his leg. “You’re sure?”

“Yep. You can keep that, it’s just a copy.”

The pencil hovers over the title of the piece for a moment, and then Ranboo gently begins to write. 

_Played piano with Fundy during the night. Still haven’t found the book. You had to have left it somewhere._

“Have you tried asking other people if they’ve seen it?” Fundy questions. 

Ranboo hesitates. “Oh. Uh, no, I don’t think so.”

“You could do that tomorrow. I’ll keep my eyes out, too.”

“Sure.” Ranboo’s thin fingers tuck the pencil behind his ear on impulse, and he folds the sheet music into a small square, slotting it into his shirt pocket. “Thank you.”

Fundy opens his mouth to answer, but is interrupted by a rather loud, startling noise.

He and Ranboo turn to the doorway to see Quackity in all his pajama clad glory, lowering his arm from his face awkwardly, wings spread out with the force of his sneeze. 

Fundy’s eyes drift down his face, mapping out recent events with the physical evidence seared into it.

Quackity’s mouth still hasn’t healed completely. The respawn scar gapes across his cheek, over his lips, a twisted, burning lightning bolt dragging from his left ear underneath his chin and ending in a sinkhole in the shallow of his collarbone, where the handle of Technoblade’s fucking pickaxe had caught on the cavern of his jaw and finally, finally stilled.

Quackity told Fundy that when Technoblade ripped it out, he took half his face with it. What Quackity didn’t tell Fundy was whether or not Techno decided it was worth the energy required to drive the pickaxe through his skull before he left. 

Quackity’s hand comes up to push against his chin, fingernails chipped where he’d bit them down, and Fundy thinks he can figure out the answer on his own, actually. 

“Sorry,” Quackity says, hoarse. “I was just getting a drink.”

The kitchen is in the other direction. Fundy decides he’s not going to point that out. “No problem.”

“What’s up?” Quackity crosses his arms.

“I’m having a crisis,” Ranboo tells him.

“Oh.”

“Mild crisis,” Fundy says. “I’m helping.”

“Fun,” Quackity says. “It’s a good night for those.”

Fundy laughs, dry. “Say that again.”

“Can’t even close your eyes these days without playing out a full fuckin’ nightmare,” Quackity jokes, but the twitch of his wings betrays him. 

“Wanna talk about it?” Ranboo asks earnestly, zeroing in on it. “I can sit on the floor. Or we can move to the couch.”

Fundy blinks. 

“Uh,” Quackity says, looking a little bit lost.

“Oh.” Ranboo clocks it, face falling by a fraction. “Sorry. You’re probably tired, that’s fine.”

“No,” Quackity says. “No. I’m just - sorry. You caught me off guard.”

Talking about things isn’t exactly part of L’manberg’s culture. Fundy and Quackity know this - especially after serving under Schlatt - but Ranboo’s all fresh takes and new blood, and clearly had a better person raising him than Wilbur Soot.

“Sorry.” 

“Stop apologizing,” Fundy says, hopping off the piano bench to sprawl across the living room floor, back propped against the couch. Quackity awkwardly shuffles across the room, sitting down straight-backed and cross-legged.

“Okay,” Ranboo says after a beat, and copies them. 

“So,” Fundy says. “Dreams and shit.”

“Dreams and shit,” Quackity echoes. His small hands are clenched uncomfortably around his arms. 

“You don’t have to do this, Q,” Fundy reassures him.

“No, I know. I - yeah. It’s good for me, or whatever.” Quackity grimaces. “I’ve been hangin’ around Sam too much.”

“I’d offer to go first to make it easier, but I don’t remember my dreams,” Ranboo says. “Sorry.”

“Oh, were it that easy,” Quackity says. “Thanks. It’s alright. I, uh. It’s a little embarrassing, I guess.”

“Try me,” Fundy says.

“I dream about Schlatt,” Quackity says.

“Oh,” Fundy says.

“Who?” Ranboo asks. Fundy and Quackity stare at him. 

Quackity raises a hand and points to the wall behind Ranboo’s head, where the three presidential portraits hang. “The bitch in the middle.”

Ranboo turns to look. “Oh.”

“I was his Vice.”

“Really?” Ranboo turns back; his hand reaches for his shirt pocket on impulse, leaving him awkwardly reaching for a memory book that just is not there.

“Yeah.” Quackity doesn’t seem to notice. “He was an asshole. Mostly.”

“You know he was,” Fundy grumbles.

Quackity drops his head into his knees. “Yeah. Just - yeah.”

“Just what?”

“He was - he wasn’t - it wasn’t always bad.”

Fundy studies Quackity, all hunched shoulders and tense wings, curled up small and defensive, and realizes he doesn’t know how fucking old the kid is.

Ranboo cocks his head to the side. “Do you dream about the bad part or the...not always bad part?”

Quackity thinks about it for a second. “Both, I think. It’s hard to say which is which.”

“Why’s that?”

“He did a lot of good for the place,” Quackity shrugs. To this, Fundy swallows down a discontented growl. “He opened borders and shit, started expanding. Helped us be a real nation. Some of his policies are still in effect, actually.”

Fundy makes a mental note to review those tomorrow. 

“But he was an - a jerk,” Ranboo says.

“Highly,” Fundy says. “He’s the one who made Wilbur snap.”

Ranboo blinks at him. Fundy sighs, and points back to the portraits. “Motherfucker on the far left.”

“Oh.”

“You can’t put what Wilbur did on anyone but himself,” Quackity states, eyes narrowed at Fundy. Which is true; in any other circumstance, Fundy would be happy to heap the blame on his dearly departed patriarch, but the thing is he hates Schlatt almost as much, and these days the numerous hateful pits in his stomach are getting harder and harder to differentiate between.

“You can’t,” Fundy scoffs, flustering, “tell me what to think about my own dad - you didn’t grow up with him, you don’t know him like I do -”

“I knew him better than you’d think,” Quackity says. “And you don’t get to make assumptions about things you didn’t bother to live through!”

“I stayed in Manberg _for the good guys_ ,” Fundy hisses. “Which is more than you can say, you’ve only ever chased your own power - why’re you defending Schlatt, anyway?”

Quackity’s face contorts. He looks like he wants nothing more than to bite back with a scathing answer, but the only noise he makes is a choked stutter. 

Fundy stares at him again. “Why _are_ you defending him?”

Quackity’s gone still. “Habit, I guess.”

“Habit,” Ranboo echoes.

“It happens,” Quackity says, dry, “it happens when you - when you get close to someone like Schlatt.”

“What does that mean?” Fundy asks, trying to shake off the static raising his hackles for the sake of diplomacy.

“You know.” Quackity picks nervously at his feathers. “Schlatt wouldn’t take well to criticism. There was always a way to explain around it. For the better. And you - I - learned to do it pretty fast.”

“Right,” Fundy mutters. 

“Maybe that’s what this is. Maybe I’m still - making up excuses.”

Gently, Ranboo pries Quackity’s hand from his wings. 

“He was an asshole,” Quackity says. “I know that, Fundy. But I just, I - it doesn’t stop me wishing things had been different.”

“Yeah,” Fundy croaks. “No. I know.”

“I dream about him all the fucking time,” Quackity says, breaking into his knees with a shuddering breath. “I wish he’d just leave me alone.”

“I’m sorry,” Ranboo murmurs. 

“Nothing you can do,” Quackity smiles. Even though it’s small, it pulls at his scar, making him wince. “It’s long over.”

It’s not. Fundy knows as well as Quackity does. It’s not over, for either of them, whether their ghosts be physical or rattling around in their heads. 

“I think I should start working,” Quackity says, shakily getting back on his feet. “I won’t be going back to sleep. May as well get a head start.”

Fundy hums, yawning. His limbs feel heavy. “Hey, Q, keep an eye out for Ranboo’s journal, yeah? He misplaced it earlier.”

“You don’t have to,” Ranboo says, scrambling to stand, too. 

“Oh, shit, yeah, no problem.” Quackity knocks his elbow into Ranboo’s side. “Least I can do to repay you for talking.”

“You don’t have to repay me.”

“Shut up. It’s fair.”

“Okay.”

“Fundy?” 

Fundy cracks open an eye. “What.”

“You look like you’re about to pass out,” Quackity says. “Wanna take a nap on the couch?”

“No,” Fundy grumbles. “I didn’t - I don’t take naps.”

“Do you want to go to bed on the couch?” Ranboo supplies.

Fundy sneers, then yawns, then reconsiders, hanging his head. “Fuck. How long have I got?” 

“Long as you need,” Quackity says firmly. Fundy shudders as the shorter man hooks his arm over his shoulders, pulling him up and depositing him unceremoniously onto the couch. “I’ll make sure to cover anything Tubbo needs you for.”

Fundy squints at him. It registers in the back of his head that Quackity’s out of place kindness is an apology. “Don’t be fuckin’ sorry,” he says.

Quackity just stares, confused. “Oh, he’s gone, gone.”

“I’m going to find you more blankets,” Ranboo says decisively. “Sleep well, Mr. Foreman.”

Fundy grunts in response and watches him go, eyes flickering shut. 

The last thing he sees before he falls into unconsciousness is Quackity, standing still and stiff, eyes fixed on the shadowy portraits of the L’manberg trifecta.

**Author's Note:**

> IF YOU WILL BELIEVE IT I wrote the bit with Ranboo losing his book approximately seven hours before Canon Ranboo Lost His Book. They call me the prophet


End file.
